Summer is over

Summer is over and I have my usual melancholy - another year over. I used to absolutely hate the kids going back to school. Some mums couldn't wait for term to start, whereas I always felt like weeping. Still, lots to look forward to, mustn't get gloomy. Christmas stuff in the shops already.

I’ve been a bit too busy to blog recently, and as I felt I hadn’t been making too much progress with my carpe diem list, I didn’t really have the inclination. However, when I took stock, I have actually done a couple of the things on the list. So here goes:

I got out my mother’s old oak wooden bowl, sanded and sanded, wire wooled and wire wooled (messy), and finally varnished it. It looks great. I don’t know quite why I bothered, because there’s nothing special about it, and my mother was never fond of it (“Well, it was war time, there wasn’t much you could get for wedding presents.”) But I’ve always felt it was a pleasing shape, and it is a good big chunk of English oak. So mending or restoring something was on the list, and it was right that it was, because the end result was very satisfying.

One thing was to attend a sporting event. I’ve half done that – we went to see the Tour of Britain start from the Castle this morning. We saw Wiggins and Cavendish, which was exciting, but I’m not going to tick it off, because really the Castle is so close it would have been pathetic not to go, and also the crowds were such that I really didn’t see very much. 

Then we went to London, to the National Theatre to see Timon of Athens. This is part of our ambition to see every Shakespeare play on stage.  So although Phil has torn the meniscus in his knee, and can’t walk very far, we had a lovely day. The River Festival was on so there was lots of added value in the form of acrobats and barge racing. London looked marvellous, as always, but the tube seemed much cleaner than it used to be. The streets have been clean for ages, but there was a definite difference with the tube. Also there are people walking along the foreshore of the Thames at low tide – we remember it being thickly covered with black smelly sludge. So all that was great.

One can see why Timon is a lesser performed play. The language isn’t generally as gripping, although Timon has a couple of enormously powerful  speeches.   The production made use of imagery of the City and the Occupy movement, and that worked well. I did admire Simon Russell Beale’s movement and body language when he was reduced to a down and out. It was creepy, and somewhat guilt inducing, to recognise the shaky run, the lack of social inhibition, and the shuffling, poorly coordinated movement that you see in street people.  I don’t know how he managed it, but somehow Russell Beale made you see that Timon’s insane generosity when he is rich is because he believes that he is unlovable. So his rejection of everything afterwards makes  sense. So more moving than I expected, and we’re glad we went.